The change came like a shiver beneath their skin and scales.
Erend and Eccar didn't see it at first. Their eyes were too locked on the slaughter of the grey creatures, their bodies too wrapped in momentum of their torrent of flame, walls of stone, a relentless tide of motion and abominations that want them dead.
But something shifted. The ash-filled air grew heavier, not with smoke or blood but with something else. They can feel pressure, or a presence of some other being in the distance. A weight that settled onto their chests like unseen hands.
They feel emotion in the air.
It surged in the windless silence between explosions and screams. They can feel sorrow so vast it felt ancient. Fury that feels sharp enough to pierce bone and hatred that seemed to stretch across lifetimes.
It pressed in around them like the world itself was weeping and screaming at once. And all of that were directed at them.
Erend parried a charging beast then burning it in the air. He glanced at Eccar across the storm of monsters. Their eyes met for only a breath but it was enough.
Neither spoke. There was no need of word right now. That brief connection shared everything about their confusion, the warning, and the grim realization that something darker was coming. But first, they had to survive this.
Erend gritted his teeth and fire surging from his arms in a blazing wave. He move his body with fury, unleashing a blast wide enough to incinerate over fifty grey beasts with giant size, their bodies disintegrating in the inferno immediately and become just like the ash around them. The heat cracked the already blackened earth and boiled the air.
Beside him, Eccar slammed both fists into the ground. The land exploded upward in a jagged eruption of stone, impaling and crushing anything within his reach. A hundred more creatures fell beneath his Magic, their twisted bodies broken and still.
But above the carnage, the sky shifted again.
The figure atop the broken tower still wore a calm mask, but behind their black-green eyes burned a cold growing flame. Hatred deep and bottomless churning beneath their skin like magma beneath bark.
They rose into the air, vines coiling around them like wings. A dense aura of sickly green Magic thickened around their body, forming a sphere.
They began to drift through the crimson sky with slow but deliberate move. Their gaze locked only on Erend and Eccar.
Below them, the land itself split open wider.
The ground moaned as ancient fissures tore across the battlefield. Great cracks opened in the earth vomiting ash and dark mist. And from within, they came, the giants that shaped like dead trees. They weree towering things with a hundred meters tall, their bodies made of withered bark and rotten limbs.
Their arms dragged long branches like spears. Their legs rooted into the ground with every step, only to tear free again with bone-shaking force.
They weren't just wood, they were alive with old and cursed life filled with hatred.
And they were moving.
Five of them rose from the cracked ground like ancient titans pulled from graves. Their eyeless faces turned toward the fight where Erend and Eccar located.
The figure in the sky extended both arms.
"Rise, my people," they whispered.
The voice wasn't heard. It was felt deep in their soul, the soul of their people. A vibration that rippled through the bones of the giants and Erend and Eccar also able to feel it.
And the dead-tree colossi obeyed.
Their great limbs cracked as they walked, their steps shaking the blackened earth. The smaller grey creatures parted before them like insects.
They marched straight toward the Dragonborns, ancient wrath pouring from every step.
Erend and Eccar realized something was happening and finally turned to face them fully.
Their expressions hardened when they see those giant trees.
"What the hell are they?" Eccar muttered, eyes wide behind the sheen of his scaled face. His fists still clenched, the stone across his arms trembling with the pressure of what approaching them right now. It's the first time he saw something like these.
Erend kept his gaze on the towering figures.
"They look like trees," he said simply, voice calm. He could feel the storm beneath his skin, the anxious pulse of something unnatural approaching, something far worse than the grey creatures they'd been slaughtering.
But still… he wasn't panicking.
Because this was still here. In this broken world.
He glanced at the looming silhouettes as they trudged forward with cracking limbs and black bark glistening in the red light. If these things had made it through the rift and had stepped foot in their world…
The thought twisted something deep in his gut. Cities would fall. Forests would be flattened. Nothing would survive.
Fighting them here was the good option. Better they bleed in this cursed land than outside of it and in the world occupied by so many.
Eccar didn't need to ask what Erend was thinking. He kept his gaze fixed forward and said dryly,
Then, with a grin splitting his face, he added, "Well… we're about to kill trees now, then."
Without waiting, Eccar spread his stone-armored wings. With a burst of air he launched himself into the sky. In a blink, he was already at eye level with one of the towering titans—though the creature had no eyes to meet his.
The dead-tree colossus creaked, black sap oozing from open cracks as it turned its eyeless face toward him.
Eccar didn't hesitate. Earth surged into his hand, forming a massive spear of jagged stone. He throw it forward.
The spear shot forward and struck the giant in the head.
It pierced the bark with a thunderous crack and lodged deep, spraying splinters in all directions. But the colossus didn't even flinched. It groaned and kept walking as though impalement meant nothing.
"They're like zombies…" Eccar said through telepathy.
"Zombie trees?" Erend replied, voice flat but edged with a dry smirk.
"Yeah." Eccar let out a breathless chuckle. "Haha. I hate this place."
The giants moved closer to them. Each step rattled the ground. Their limbs dragged through the battlefield, leaving trenches of ash and shattered bodies of the greys.
Erend summoned the fire around him again and follow Eccar in the air.